Breast cancer is becoming a leading death of women all over the world; clinical experiments demonstrate that early detection and accurate diagnosis can increase the potential of treatment. In order to improve the breast cancer diagnosis precision, this paper presents a novel automated segmentation and classification method for mammograms. We conduct the experiment on both DDSM database and MIAS database, firstly extract the region of interests (ROIs) with chain codes and using the rough set (RS) method to enhance the ROIs, secondly segment the mass region from the location ROIs with an improved vector field convolution (VFC) snake and following extract features from the mass region and its surroundings, and then establish features database with 32 dimensions; finally, these features are used as input to several classification techniques. In our work, the random forest is used and compared with support vector machine (SVM), genetic algorithm support vector machine (GA-SVM), particle swarm optimization support vector machine (PSO-SVM), and decision tree. The effectiveness of our method is evaluated by a comprehensive and objective evaluation system; also, Matthew's correlation coefficient (MCC) indicator is used. Among the state-of-the-art classifiers, our method achieves the best performance with best accuracy of 97.73%, and the MCC value reaches 0.8668 and 0.8652 in unique DDSM database and both two databases, respectively. Experimental results prove that the proposed method outperforms the other methods; it could consider applying in CAD systems to assist the physicians for breast cancer diagnosis.
Keywords: Automated mass segmentation; Classification; Computer-aided detection; Mammography; Random forest.